How We Make It

1. Ingredients

Our 4 key ingredients:

Barley - We use malted barley, which provides the foundation for the flavour of the beer, and roasted barley. Our traditional craft of roasting barley gives GUINNESS® its wonderful dark ruby red colour (it looks black, but hold your glass up to the light, and you'll see there's a ruby in every glass, as the old saying has it) and its unique roasted character.

Hops - We use the finest female hop (we discriminate in favour of the fairer sex), and use around double the amount of hops in our brew than most beers, for a more intense flavour and aroma. Hops are also a natural preservative, giving GUINNESS® the long life essential for global export.

Water - Like Arthur Guinness before us, we prize our water for its good quality and softness. In fact, it's so important to us, we call it 'liquor'. At the St James's Gate Brewery in Dublin the water comes from springs in the Wicklow Mountains.

GUINNESS® Yeast - To capture the full freshness of the ingredients, we use our famous strain of GUINNESS® yeast, descended down from Arthur's time. It works like no other to ensure our beer is fully fermented and charged with flavour. It's so valuable to us that a small reserve amount is kept under lock and key in case something should happen to our main supply.

We don't believe anything should be wasted, so the spent grains from the brewing process become animal feed, the hops become fertilizer and surplus yeast makes yeast extract or health products.